Tantra

What it is

A body of ritual, yogic and philosophical traditions appearing in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism from around the fifth or sixth century CE, organised around initiation, mantra, visualisation and the transformation of ordinary experience into a vehicle for liberation.

Its defining move is the reversal of renunciation. Where classical yoga and Vedānta treat the body, the senses and the world as obstacles to be withdrawn from, tantra treats them as the means. The material world is not a distraction from the divine; it is the divine's own energy, and can be used. This is why tantric traditions are world-affirming in a way most Indian soteriology is not.

Its characteristic elements:

• Dīkṣā — initiation, without which the practices are held not to work and not to be permitted
• Mantra — sound as effective power, not merely as symbol
• Yantra and maṇḍala — geometric diagrams as maps and as dwelling places of deities
• Deity yoga — identification with a deity through detailed visualisation, treated at length under Tibetan practice
• The subtle body — channels, centres and kuṇḍalinī
• Guru — an initiating teacher, without whom nothing proceeds

Where it came from

Tantric texts — the tantras, āgamas and saṃhitās — appear from around the mid-first millennium CE, in Śaiva, Śākta, Vaiṣṇava, Buddhist and Jain forms. They are ritual manuals rather than philosophical treatises, and there are a great many of them.

Its philosophical peak is Kashmir Śaivism, and above all Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1016), whose Tantrāloka is a work of the first rank — a non-dual system in which the entire universe is the play of a single conscious reality recognising itself, and in which aesthetic experience, ordinary sensation and ritual all become routes to that recognition. He also wrote the standard Indian treatise on aesthetics. He is one of the most substantial philosophers this site covers and is almost unknown in the West.

The Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, a short text of 112 contemplative techniques, is the most accessible classical tantric work and has been widely translated.

Buddhist tantra developed in parallel and became Vajrayāna, carried into Tibet as Indian Buddhism declined.

How it is practised

Under initiation, within a lineage, following a prescribed sequence, with commitments taken. Practice consists overwhelmingly of ritual, mantra recitation, visualisation and internal yogic work.

The transgressive rites exist and are a minority within a minority. The kaula or so-called left-hand traditions employ the pañcamakāra, the five substances beginning with M — wine, meat, fish, parched grain and sexual union — deliberately using what is forbidden to a conventional practitioner in order to break the hold of purity categories.

They are real. They are also: restricted to specific lineages; requiring initiation; interpreted symbolically or substituted with permitted materials in most traditions that reference them; performed as ritual under precise conditions rather than as recreation; and a very small proportion of what tantric practitioners do.

What we can and cannot say

We can say that what the West calls tantra is essentially unrelated to any of this, and the construction is documented.

The lineage of the Western version: Pierre Bernard, an American who styled himself Oom the Omnipotent and taught a sexualised "tantra" from the 1900s; John Woodroffe's translations, which were serious but were widely read through a lens looking for the erotic; and decisively Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) in the 1970s, whose enormously popular teaching fused tantra with sexual liberation for a Western audience. From there the modern industry of sacred-sexuality workshops, tantric massage and neotantra.

Hugh Urban's Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power (2003) traces how a body of ritual literature became, in Western hands, a synonym for prolonged sex — a transformation in which colonial-era scandal and modern marketing did most of the work.

The practical result is that a Western "tantra" course typically contains no initiation, no lineage, no mantra practice, no deity yoga, no ritual and no philosophical framework — that is, none of tantra — while carrying its name and its implied authority.

We can say the guru risk here is unusually high, and the Rajneesh case demonstrates it. The Rajneeshpuram community in Oregon culminated in the deliberate contamination of restaurant salad bars with salmonella in 1984, sickening more than seven hundred people — still the largest bioterrorist attack in United States history — along with an attempted assassination and extensive wiretapping. The structural conditions are those described under the guru problem, with the additional factor that transgression is doctrinally sanctioned, which removes the ordinary objection to a teacher's behaviour.

We can say the classical tradition is philosophically serious, and that Abhinavagupta deserves attention that the Western reception has made almost impossible to give him.

We cannot teach any of it, and would not. Initiation is not a formality in these traditions and this site does not have it.

Further reading

• Christopher Wallis, Tantra Illuminated (2012) — a practitioner-scholar, clear about the distortions.
• Hugh Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power (2003).
• The Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, in a scholarly translation.